When I was about eight, my household had decided in invest in a home computer. It was the shittiest little Gateway PC you ever saw, but to the miniature version of me it was the coolest thing ever. not that I ever really did much on it other than mess around with Solitaire or visit one of the only three websites I knew of.

That changed one night when my father brought home a game to stick onto it. The thing took hours to install. I thumbed through the little instruction booklet the entire time. When it was finally finished, I embarked on a fantastic journey I could never have expected.

I admit that the game hasn’t aged very well, visually. The FMVs are decent enough for something that came out in the late 90s, but good lord is the standard look of gameplay something… special.

But none of that mattered to the starry-eyed eight year old as I slowly made my way through the wide and amazing world of FFVII. I liked the goofy lego-looking character models. The combat was fun, though I’ll admit I missed some of the slightly more complex aspects at the time, the PS1-quality music was a massive influence on what I would enjoy down the road, and the story is still a work of art.

Like Timesplitters, FFVII’s spot on this list is half nostalgia. But even after all these years there’s still that bit of magic whenever I load it up. I always seem to manage to find one tiny facet that I’d missed — whether it be an item location or a piece of dialog from one of the NPCs, or even the interaction between different party members I don’t normally use.

FFVII is the game that pretty much shaped the JRPG landscape from that point on. It helped turn the Playstation into the gaming mecha that it was throughout the early 2000’s, and it spawned millions of flame wars all over internet gaming forums. And it was there for me every day I came home after a day at school.

I can still remember the day I beat it. I had been home sick that day. Instead of watching daytime talk shows I decided to try and maybe see if I could get through the last stage of the final boss. My father had yet to do it, but maybe I could. And I did.

And then I called my father and gloated like the little shit that I was.